


The Monk was Blessed

by RobertSaysThis



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (1963), Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Alternate Canon, Gen, In this the War Monk is played by Brian Blessed, Making a Trinity of I Claudius Time Lords, Time War (Doctor Who)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-06
Updated: 2019-05-06
Packaged: 2020-02-27 05:35:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 818
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18732640
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RobertSaysThis/pseuds/RobertSaysThis
Summary: In the canon-divergent Doctor Who series I'm writing I ended up with an entire alternate backstory for the Meddling Monk, what they did in the Time War, and how they started down the road to becoming the person they do.Featuring young BRIAN BLESSED as the War Monk, a dour and miserable man.





	The Monk was Blessed

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [The End of History](https://archiveofourown.org/works/17513816) by [RobertSaysThis](https://archiveofourown.org/users/RobertSaysThis/pseuds/RobertSaysThis). 



The Time War broke the Doctor, but it broke the Monk in a slightly different way. For the Monk, two things had remained roughly constant through all his lives— that he was not averse to changing history, and that he would put saving his own skin over any particularly moral consideration. But the Time War began to put both these things under strain.

In his past, the Monk had allied with the Daleks to save himself, but his experiences in the war rapidly bought home the problem in that way of thinking. To ally with the Daleks was futile because the Daleks intended to overthrow reality: as the Monk himself was part of that reality, self-preservation had to entail the preservation of far more than he’d previously supposed. It didn’t make him think the rules of other Time Lords might actually make sense – he wasn’t stupid – but it did make him question the rules he himself had followed.

And so the Monk attempted to weaponise what he’d previously done for a laugh: to use his knowledge of changing history to unwrite the Daleks from existence. But his efforts helped the Time Lords realise what they’d already feared: that the Daleks were historically inevitable. The way in which they arose in the world might change, and the exact way they manifested might be different, but to a first degree of approximation the universe would always have Daleks.

This rubbed against one of the Monk’s greatest fears. He had always valued the chaos of freedom, and in changing history he’d taken pride in being a more rebellious rebel than the Doctor could ever hope to be. But he now worried that the mutability of history was an illusion. Certain outcomes might be inevitable, and certain endings could be preordained. It might not even matter if you won a war against something like the Daleks— sooner or later that something would return, and when it did it was inevitable that it would win.

So the Monk fell into a deep depression as the War dragged on. It’s notable that while all his prior selves had been jovial and relaxed to some degree, this version of the Monk would rarely crack a smile. He was serious and withdrawn, and increasingly obsessed with the threat the Daleks imposed upon all history, which went beyond even the danger they posed to his people in the war. Then, together with the Doctor, he discovered something that made it all worse.

As scientific efforts to study the inevitability of the Daleks failed, the Monk and the Doctor turned to more desperate avenues of study. When they did they discovered something that terrified them both— a quasi-religious concept held by the Daleks which they called the Dalek Eternal. Like the Time Lords, the Daleks knew that time could be rewritten, and that the history of the universe might change into something completely different were it nudged in just the right way. But one of the ways in which time might be rewritten would be _to change history so it could never be changed again_. When this happened, there would be no altering the timeline of the universe— it would have settled into its final and immovable shape.

And the Daleks believed they knew what this shape would be: their own race triumphing forever, over every other being that ever lived. They would rule a version of history with all the past and future full of Daleks, where there was no hope of liberation of any kind. They took it as an article of faith.

And the Monk began to worry that they were right.

The Monk reacted to this in a way that echoed the way the Doctor had responded to the War. Like the Doctor, he saw that living in the world he had found himself in would require him to remake his identity. But while the Doctor had forsaken his name, the Monk decided this was the time to adopt his.

Because _The Monk_ meant nothing, not really: it was a nickname the Doctor had given him lifetimes ago, because of what he was wearing and not who he was. But names have the power their owner chooses to invest in them.

In every version of history the Monk had seen, the Daleks won, and a rational man might give into despair. Even a Doctor might say there was nothing to be done; that the universe had a terminal disease. But when a Doctor says something like that a person doesn’t just give up— they go to someone who isn’t quite as qualified, who’s able to offer faith and who still believes. Maybe they were once a charlatan, and maybe they weren’t always good, but if you’re already dead then all that doesn’t matter a damn. So he decided he would stand against the Daleks.

And he’d do it in the name of the Monk.


End file.
